The Brown Decision: 'A Shining Moment'

From segregation to "resegregation": what a depressing picture.
It’s become the conventional wisdom, in the media and elsewhere,
on what has happened to the country since the decision in Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka was handed down 50 years ago
this week. But it is not correct. Some, like Philadelphia schools chief
Paul Vallas, may say that "we’re still wrestling with the same
issues" as we did in 1954. Nonsense. Brown remains a shining
moment in American history, and the changes that came in its wake can
never be undone.

How quickly we forget. Fifty years ago, when Brown was
decided, there was no interracial contact in the schools of the South,
the region where most African-American children lived. Even 10 years
later, in the 11 ex-Confederate states as a whole, a mere 1.2 percent
of black public school children went to schools that any white pupils
attended.

State-imposed pupil assignments that separated the races were what
Brown v. Board was all about. The U.S. Supreme Court did
not condemn—and never has—racially imbalanced schools per
se. It spoke of the "detrimental effect" that officially sanctioned
separation of the races had—"denoting the inferiority of the
Negro group," generating "a feeling of inferiority as to their status
in the community. ..." The message was pertinent to the entire Jim Crow
system, not just the rules governing education. The whole point of
state-sanctioned segregation, from water fountains to hospitals, was to
convey a permanent sense of racial inferiority. That purpose drove the
rules governing seats on a bus, as well as those dictating school
assignments. Hence the domino effect—the rapid extension of the
ruling in Brown to other spheres of southern public life. The
logic of the court’s decision could not be confined to
schools.

Southern apartheid crumbled—too slowly, for sure, but down a
long, hard road it did fall apart. Today, the typical black child
attends a school in which just over half the students are
African-American, nearly a third are white, and there are sizable
numbers of Latinos and Asians as well. Moreover, close to a third of
blacks and a quarter of Latinos are in schools with white majorities.
Gary Orfield, the director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard
University, and others who argue "resegregation" are simply counting
the number of whites in a school system, and finding that number
inadequate across much of the urban landscape.

That definition has an odd result. A school in Louisiana that
reflects the state’s population (half white, half black) is
labeled as more "integrated" than one in San Francisco, where public
school enrollment is currently 11 percent white, 16 percent black, 22
percent Hispanic, 0.6 percent American Indian, and 51 percent Asian.
Yet surely the logic of calling a majority-Asian school with few whites
"segregated"—with the implication that learning is likely to be
compromised—makes no sense given the record of Asian academic
accomplishment. In addition, such diversity, such a rainbow of colors,
is a civil rights dream come true, one might think.

Simply counting whites also ignores the demographic landscape. The
standard measure of racial separation (which Gary Orfield rejects) asks
quite a different question: the degree to which schools are
"imbalanced" relative to the actual racial mix in the district. The
Imbalance Index—as it’s called— takes the number of
white students in a district as a fact, and focuses on the distribution
of children, given the existing demographic constraints. By that
measure, there has been much improvement over the past three
decades.

A Boston school, by the measure of "imbalance," is not "segregated"
when it is roughly 13 percent white because whites are only 13 percent
of the city’s school population. The charge of "segregation"
would seem to suggest a problem that has a remedy. But no amount of
goodwill can change the fact that in central cities, especially, the
number of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians has grown substantially in
recent decades, and thus the proportion of white students has gone
down. School districts cannot change their racial makeup, and the sorry
history of busing (with no gains in student achievement) suggests
schools should concentrate on good education for the children who
appear on their doorstep, however racially "imbalanced" that group of
pupils might be.

The end of de jure segregation in the South did not level the
educational playing field. The Supreme Court in 1954 only raised such
hopes implicitly, however. The decision was almost a blank slate, more
notable for what it omitted than for what it actually said. The wait
from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown had been so long
that inevitably Americans who were committed to civil rights read their
hopes of true racial equality into the sparse opinion. But the
’54 decision was only a minimal response to morally and
constitutionally egregious wrongs.

That minimal response contained no reference to a colorblind
Constitution. In 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in
Plessy, had argued that "our Constitution is colorblind, and
neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." But that wonderful
dissent was the radical vision of a man who has remained a voice in the
constitutional wilderness. Brown contained no singing phrases,
no majestic moral rhetoric. Its conclusion was clear enough, but the
substance was not. And thus the decision was left vulnerable to a
process of revision that, over time, legitimized race-conscious
strategies in an effort to achieve racially balanced schools—
strategies that the attorneys for the plaintiffs in Brown had
explicitly rejected. In fact, a few years after the ’54 decision,
one of Thurgood Marshall’s chief legal aides, Jack Greenberg,
declared that if there were "complete freedom of choice, or
geographical zoning, or any other nonracial standard, and all the
Negroes still ended up in separate schools, there would seem to be no
constitutional objection."

Race-conscious strategies like busing were driven by the desire for
better schooling. Integration was essential to learning, busing
advocates insisted. But, while the Detroit school district is almost
entirely black, that is no excuse for the failure to impart the skills
and knowledge that those students need to do well in American society.
Equal educational outcomes for the typical child in every racial and
ethnic group should be the first aim of American educators today.
Racial equality depends on it. The focus on "resegregation" is a
distraction from that task. An African-American child does not need to
sit next to a white student to become a good reader—any more than
a white youngster needs to sit next to an Asian to learn math.

The average black or Hispanic student today leaves high school with
an 8th grade education. On the nation’s most reliable
tests—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the
typical non-Asian minority student at age 17 is scoring less well than
at least 80 percent of his or her white classmates. In fact, in five of
the seven subjects tested by NAEP, a majority of black students perform
in the lowest category—"below basic." These students do not have
even a "partial" mastery of the "fundamental" knowledge and skills
expected of students in the 12th grade. Hispanics are doing only a tad
better. Moreover, the news is no happier when we switch our gaze to the
top of the scale. In math, for instance, only 0.2 percent of black
students fall into NAEP’s "advanced" category; the figure for
whites is 11 times higher and for Asians 37 times higher. Again,
Hispanic students are only slightly ahead of blacks.

This is the problem that Brown could not fix—although
of course it was much worse a half-century ago. But for more than a
decade, scores have been stagnant, and a further closing of the racial
gap in learning will likely take profound educational change.

Almost everyone agrees on what great schools for academically
disadvantaged kids look like. They set high academic and behavioral
standards, providing greatly extended instructional time with more
hours in the day, longer weeks, and longer years. They have terrific
principals who have the authority and autonomy to manage their budgets,
set salaries, staff the school with fabulous teachers, and get rid of
those who don’t work out. These schools focus relentlessly on the
core academic subjects, insisting that their students learn the times
tables, basic historical facts, spelling, punctuation, the rules of
grammar, and the meaning of often unfamiliar words. They provide safe,
orderly environments in which to teach and learn. And they aim to
transform the habits and values of their students, as those habits and
values affect academic achievement. Thus, students must arrive at
school regularly and on time, dress neatly, address classmates and
teachers with respect and civility, and work as hard as they can,
completing their homework every day.

Figuring out what constitutes good schooling—the sort that
would really make for equal educational opportunity—is not hard.
But no one has a good answer to the question of how to put such
education in place across the nation, wherever kids are failing to get
the skills and knowledge they desperately need to do well in
today’s America. Ensuring skills and knowledge—not somehow
finding more white classmates for minority students—is the
unfinished business of Brown. It could not be more urgent.

Coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision is
underwritten by grants from the Ford and Rockefeller
foundations.

Abigail Thernstrom is the co-author (with Stephan Thernstrom) of
No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. She is also a member of
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a member of the Massachusetts
state board of education, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan
Institute.

Abigail Thernstrom is the co-author (with Stephan Thernstrom) of No
Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. She is also a member of
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a member of the Massachusetts
state board of education, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan
Institute.

Vol. 23, Issue 37, Pages 42-43, 52

Published in Print: May 19, 2004, as The Brown Decision: 'A Shining Moment'

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